Marilyn Manson - Heaven Upside Down
The album art above is not the official album artwork. My usual Google search for the high resolution cover was unfruitful, but I did find a Reddit user’s (Scelus_Sceleris) fan-made artwork and I did a small amount of my own editing to it. The original is here:
Marilyn Manson has been riding a bit of a second wind lately even in the eyes of some who wrote him off after his shock factor wore off, and The Pale Emperor was certainly a strong statement of his merit as an artist independent of media buzz and controversy. However, this does bring up the unfortunate topic that comes up with nearly every piece I continue to see about Marilyn Manson and his new music. Despite being decades old at this point, people continue to bring up his notoriety in the nineties and at the turn of the century, a notoriety he made the most of from an artistic standpoint when his name was practically a pair of dirty words. But Manson himself predicted and commented on his own exit from the public eye, noting that all shock value wears off and that his was not going to last forever either. He’s made very clear with his music and in interviews that his main motive is artistic, and he’s clearly not trying to be shocking anymore because people can’t be shocked by something they’re expecting to be shocked by. Nevertheless, fans and writers clamor for Manson to try to reclaim his position as public enemy number one to concerned parents, even though it would be so obviously contrived and unsuccessful and would end up making Marilyn Manson look so pathetic. Well, fans for the most part mainly beg for a return to the industrial metal of Antichrist Superstar, but therein still lies a common desire for Manson to live in the past even if it’s not phrased that way, regardless of the entirely new context in which Manson exists.
Persnickety fans get a bit of satiation with the industrial edge of the first four tracks on Heaven Upside Down though, and it’s hardly a cheap callback to his nineties work. I found myself quite pleased with the super distorted bass across the album’s entry, Manson sounding comfortable on top of it and not submerged by it. The album does seem to follow a stylistic chronology though, with elements of each of his previous albums showing up in phases across the album, the first four tracks clearly being representative of his industrial side, the winding “Saturnalia” sounding a bit like Eat Me, Drink Me, and the jumpy “JE$U$ CRI$I$” reminiscent of The Golden Age of Grotesque. The last three songs seem to echo the sentiments and style of his second renaissance as well, rounding off a contemplative and recollective album.
Lyrically, Manson seems to be a little more abstract this time with less wordplay than what filled The Pale Emperor, and nowhere near as much conceptual cohesiveness as the famous trilogy. This is not to say that the lyrics are vapid for Manson or unrewarding, but being sold as his most heady and complicated album lyrically was sort of misleading. What tangible meaning the lyrics hold is often attained through extensive subjective extrapolation and not quite the direct and creative approach to social commentary Manson usually excels at. While his latest efforts have been more introspective and reflective of his complex position in music, many of the lyrics on Heaven Upside Down seem kind of all over the place and ethereal, leaving the album stuck in limbo conceptually.
I do think Marilyn Manson slid back a bit from The Pale Emperor, but Heaven Upside Down is a solid addition to the post-controversy era of his discography and it’s good hearing him over a myriad of sounds, especially hearing him sounding competent over industrial metal again.
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